Which sounds dreadful, but the real device is very fast - in practice, the emulator just requires a bit of patience. Playing with all this is good fun, if not exactly quick - the emulator runs at about 1/20th the speed of the actual device on my Mac. Then, by (virtually) rotating the (virtual!) Duo 2, the UI becomes one giant tablet, arranged in portrait mode and now the screens are used as one big canvas - so tapping through to a photo would bring it up across the two screens and then you'd have to use the back gesture or control to return to the thumbnails, etc. In standard use, Photos here (actually part of OneDrive) intelligently puts up thumbnails on the left and then photo detail on the right screen. span both screens and recognise the device format, putting up content intelligently (the screen below shows Microsoft's Outlook putting up the inbox headers on the left and message content on the right)Īnd, thanks to the mimicking of device rotation, you can move the virtual Duo 2 into 'laptop' (or just 'vertical') mode, as shown below.span both but use them as one large surface (pun intended) and increase the size of all UI elements to match - this works OK in the Edge browser, as it's about a large content area, but it looks ugly in many 'single screen' apps.The main thing to play with on the Duo or Duo 2 is, of course, the spanning gesture, dragging up from the white line to 'drop' the application's thumbnail within the hinge area, which works using your mouse or touchscreen here. Note that the emulator environment saves your set-up as part of its close-down routines, so you don't have to do things more than once - unless you really need to start from scratch for some development reason. So, below I've made a start with homescreens and adding some applications to my app drawer. The right hand control panel gives access to things you'd do on the device, such as rotating it, using a navigation control or a volume button. Once booted, you can set things up more or less as you would the actual Surface Duo 2, Google apps and services aside. As a rule of thumb, the Surace Duo 2 emulator will need about 4GB of RAM to itself, not surprising as it's largely running the same code as on the physical phone, where it also uses 4GB or so to get booted and going. On my 8GB RAM Mac, it means quitting the Chrome browser before starting the emulator, otherwise things start to get very slow indeed. However, before you get going, it's vitally important to clear as much RAM as possible on your desktop. Under Windows you should now be able to start the emulator from the Start menu, while you have to get down to Terminal level and enter a command on the Mac (I said things might get geeky). So, for example, for Windows you'd want the first one listed below - and for my Mac you can see the one I ticked: Then there's Microsoft's Surface Duo adaptations and skins for the emulator - slightly confusingly there are two for each desktop OS, but this is just because one is for the Android 10 original Surface Duo, and one is for the Android 11-powered Surface Duo 2. You then install this, making sure the right components are included (they are by default) - I won't go into further detail here, since if you can't make your way through the instructions at this stage then perhaps you shouldn't be fiddling with emulators and SDKs. There's Google's Android Studio to download first, which puts the Android SDK and basic/standard emulator on your desktop. Pressing on though, you'll need to start at Microsoft's Surface Duo emulator page here. Note that I was actually using a Mac here, which is fully supported, though given Microsoft's heritage I suspect that they'd like you to be using a Windows 10 PC - and it's all certainly a little easier to get going on the latter. I did also try the Amazon App Store, which installs itself OK, but little of its content is ultimately accepted by the Surface Duo 2 emulator. from apkmirror), though the majority don't needing Play Services. Many 'apk's (application installer packages) work (e.g. Although there's nothing from Google included out of the 'box' other than the base Android OS, there's still plenty you can have fun with.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |